Show HN: Hyphenate.dev: illustration of TeX's hyphenation algorithm

4 pointsposted 10 hours ago
by returningfory2

1 Comments

svat

10 hours ago

This is cool, good luck with your project! For this page, you may want to pick as the default examples some longer words (like say "nevertheless") that show both positive (odd number) and negative (even number) patterns.

Also for anyone else reading this, Frank Liang's thesis "Word Hy-phen-a-tion by Com-put-er" (https://tug.org/docs/liang/) is a great read, and the data structure it uses (packed tries) is clever too. The section of the TeX program that describes hyphenation is also an interesting read, and Knuth added a further twist (what we may call a hash-packed trie) in his frequent-words literate program for Bentley's column.